After writing this weekly blog or nearly five years I think it might be time to finish! The original idea for a blog linked to the St Mungos website, was to have something new and fresh each week to get people back onto the homepage, but I think with the new website in place it’s no longer necessary.

Volunteer is such a bland word for such an important group of people. I tried to find a more exciting word, but even my trusty Thesaurus (a word I can’t say out loud due to my childhood speech impediment and lisp) let me down.

I really, really, really, do love my church staff. I have the great privilege and pleasure of working with a great bunch of people. You couldn’t have a better group of Christians to share mission and ministry with.

Depending what you think a ‘vestry’ is, that statement will sound unusual, unexpected if not impossible. Some people will never have heard of that word, others will assume it’s actually a storage room attached to a church, but in the Scottish Episcopal Church it is the name of a committee.

I still get amazed that I can actually write that ‘I love prayer’, and ‘I love praying with other people’, because it might come as a shock for you to hear a church minister say it, but I find personal prayer difficult and I used to find praying with other people dull and boring.

Last Sunday in St Mungo’s church we gave out wrist bands. This was part of our Vision Sunday talk, which was called I love my church. The purple wrist bands, with the words ‘I love my church’, and the Mungos logo recessed into them were supposed to be a memory aid to help us think about what it means to say “I love my church”.

Since I mentioned having a new dog (in the first blog of this series) as the best thing that happened to my prayer life, everybody has been asking me how is my dog – which is odd because I thought they should be asking me how my prayer life is, rather more important for the church minister!

When I get completely stuck in my prayer life, which is quite often, I have found it very helpful to read Bible prayers! Sometimes they can inspire me to pray better, sometimes they actually have words that express how I feel, and sometimes I can just read them out as I know that they are prayers that have power and

I’m happy to report that my prayer life has improved remarkably since getting a new dog, as I wrote in my last blog I need the “forced” discipline of having to go out to walk the dog two or three times a day to act as the trigger to help me pray more. And already my prayer life has improved,